Favors acceptance of a causal relationship in 4 AE and vaccine relationships

Favors rejection of a causal relationship in 5 AE/vaccine relationships (note: this includes MMR-autism)

Inadequate to accept or reject: 135 AE/vaccine relationships (85%)

The US govt is expanding the Vaccine Injury Tables based on 2012′s findings. Here is detailed background (28 page PDF) http://t.co/iOGLZznW. Note that the Chief Medical Officer of the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (VICP) asked for autism to be listed as a “secondary cause” of vaccine injury in 2012 (see page 8 and 9 of the report at hrsa.gov/vaccinecompensation/iomreportupdate030812.pdf). As of this writing the updates have not yet been finalized.

Shortly after this pivotal report, the Committee on Assessment of Studies of Health Outcomes Related to the Recommended Childhood Immunization Schedule commissioned a revised paper from a consultant, Martin Kulldorff, Ph.D., titled, Study Designs for the Safety Evaluation of Different Childhood Immunization Schedules. Many Vermonters provided public comment into this process. See: Opportunity for Public Comment.

Following three information meetings, the committee published their findings in, The Childhood Immunization Schedule and Safety: Stakeholder Concerns, Scientific Evidence, and Future Studies (2013).

This report clearly states that,
“Few studies have comprehensively assessed the association between the entire immunization schedule or variations in the overall schedule and categories of health outcomes, and NO STUDY has directly examined health outcomes and stakeholder concerns in precisely the way that the committee was charged to address its statement of task.” (S-5) (emphasis mine)

The committee made several recommendations. One recommendation of particular concern was that future vaccine safety research be conducted by DHHS and its corporate partners exclusively using existing closed database systems, such as the Vaccine Safety Datalink (VSD). VAERS is currently open to public scrutiny and VSD is not. VAERS data can be accessed and analyzed by independent researchers; VSD cannot. Link to VAERS via MedAlerts.org, to search vaccine reactions, HERE.

The IOM Committee’s first three recommendations (4-1, 5-1, 6-1) are good, though, and call for federal health officials to:
– Assess evidence about public confidence in the federally recommended child vaccine schedule to improve communication between doctors and the public;
– Define potential vaccine adverse health outcomes and populations biologically at increased susceptibility for suffering vaccine reactions and injury; and
– Make evaluating the safety of the child vaccine schedule a scientific research priority.

It is ironic that the IOM should now recommend more of a focus on the VSD, after it’s own report (Vaccine Safety Research, Data Access, and Public Trust ( 2005) cited “legitimate reasons for public concern about the independence and fairness of the review of VSD data sharing proposals and of determinations about when and how to release preliminary findings of VSD analyses.”

A renewed push to focus only on VSD could definitively shut out public oversight. For example, the Omnibus Autism Proceeding aggregated >5000 claims but petitioners were not granted adequate access to the Vaccine Safety Datalink.

” …noting that the CDC’s handling of the VSD thimerosal data suffered from a “lack of transparency,” that datasets “were not archived in a standard manner,” and “are not available for reanalysis,” and that CDC officials should “seek legal advice” regarding possible violations of the Federal Data Quality Act. The critical VSD information is allegedly available offshore in the archives of a private healthcare provider. The Special Masters of the Court of Federal Claims presumably could have issued subpoenas for this information but did not. For a detailed discussion of the VSD and the possible thimerosal-autism link, see David Kirby, Evidence of Harm: Mercury in Vaccines and the Autism Epidemic: A Medical Controversy (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2005).